Christian Rothmann: The Light Touch

The comprehensive monograph of the Berlin multi-talent - in stores from January 2022 onwards. Christian Rothmann (born 1954 in Kędzierzyn, Poland, lives and works in Berlin) is artistically a jack-of-all-trades, a gifted cultural bridge builder and a restless traveler through time and the world. He photographs everywhere, especially on his travels, creating photographs as artistic documentations, spontaneously created symbolic images, or as part of a conceptual series.

It is curiosity and spontaneity that distinguish him and his work; he is quick, physically and mentally, anticipating the situations that present themselves visually, no matter where. Rothmann works on several long-term projects at the same time, always noticing basketball hoops hanging in the most absurd places, observing children, paying attention to flowers and toys in restaurants and stores, interesting shadow patterns and exotic foods in unusual constellations - or, for his sequence "Legs of the World," beautiful legs, not only of women, sometimes on advertising posters or paintings in museums. He is also interested in parked, forgotten or overgrown cars, with which he points to the immobile downside of our omnipresent mobility mania.

Thus, new motifs are added again and again, found images that fall, as it were, before the feet of the attentive contemporary and eye-man Christian Rothmann.

In contrast to these "found objects," however, he also succeeds in making people of all ages and from the most diverse social and cultural circles his accomplices, for example for his series "you and me" or "Mother & Daughter.

And photography is only one means of artistic expression. Large-format, fierce painting on canvas in his Berlin-Kreuzberg studio and delicate watercolor painting on small-format paper complement it. The result is a rich, cheerful body of imagery in a variety of media. (Matthias Harder)

Christian Rothmann. "The Light Touch," edited by Matthias Harder, with texts by Andreas Haus, Young Hay, Thea Herold, Wolfgang Heyder, Daniela Kloock, Barbara Robra, Christian Rothmann, Christiane Stahl, Gerd Stern, Christoph Tannert, Wim Wenders, Hanns Zischler, Dorothee Baer-Bogenschütz, F. W. Bernstein, Liane Burkhardt/Gerd Harry Lybke, Ilonka Czerny, Jürgen Ebertowski, Elfie E. Fröhlich, Matthias Harder, Design: Christian Rothmann, Hardcover, 20 x 27 cm, 480 pages, 460 illustrations, German and English, DCV Verlag, Berlin, ISBN: 978-3-96912-068-2, Price: 45 €

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